Monthly Archives: June 2009

Up until version 2.7.1, running WordPress on an intranet was a real pain in the ass. It connects to the outside world to look for updates, to check comments for spam (using Akismet) or to fetch RSS-feeds for widgets if you configured those on your blog, … But as you typically don’t have direct internet-access on an intranet and as there was no way of letting WordPress know about a proxy, your blog timed out while it was trying to fsockopen those external sites.

Off course some WordPress-plugins do not use the HTTP API yet (e.g. Lifestream and wp-security-scan rely on Simplepie, which does not use the proxy-aware wp_remote_get-function), so you might have to be careful when installing plugins that need internet-access.

As could be expected after having visited the event the past 2 years, I attended Webscene 2009 yesterday. I didn’t “liveblog”, as there really wasn’t enough “hard info” for my likings. Maybe Frederik Marain and Jo Caudron could have changed that perception, but I didn’t make it to their presentation (networking is a bitch).

Here’s the stuff I did write down, just some quotes really;

“[With Tridion] We’ve got a Rolls Royce, but when we need to cross the desert we prefer to use the SUV [which is Drupal]” (Bart Van Herreweghe about using Tridion for belgium.be and Drupal for smaller, web2.0-oriented fast-track sites)

“When you use Google Apps, which is “Platform As A Service”, you’re tied into their platform, you can’t just take your application and put it elsewhere.” (Terramark Terremark’s Kurt Glazemakers trying to position his “Infrastructure As A Service” virtualized hosting solution, forgetting Amazon or Akamai.)

“Web 2.0 was a bust, will web 3 succeed?” (the challenging title of Charles Chrouch’s presentation about the lack of financially sound business models in social media, he didn’t explain how Twitter could make money)

Not a lot more to mention, except maybe that the new Cultuurnet-database should become available (through an API I guess) for non-commercial use. Anyone want to write UiTmaps or UiT.mobi? And One Agency has its own mobile platform, GlowBox, which is Drupal with some custom-written plugins, integrated with Siruna.

While missing out on presentations, I met various people I know from past and present stages of my work-life (great to hear things are going well Tjorven, sorry to have mistaken Panoptic for Amplexor Igor) and that’s always nice. But I would especially like to thank Tom Remans. It’s always great to chat with Tom and -even more important- he provided me with real good coffee, which (for reasons I just don’t want to understand) was only available for exhibitors. Thanks mate, really!

Last week colleagues of mine had a problem with an e-mail newsletter they wanted to send out; everything worked OK in Firefox and IE 7, but MSIE 6 displayed the wrong part of the page.

The setup was pretty basic; the URL in the newsletter pointed to the servers of the mailinglist-provider, where each request got logged and the browser was redirected (with a http 302 status-code and Location in the http response-header) to the target URL on one of our servers. That target URL contained an anchor to have the browser to display a specific tab on the page thanks to some jQuery-magic, which worked perfectly in Internet Explorer 6 in a non-redirect scenario.

The problem seemed as simple as it was annoying; MSIE 6 dropped everything starting with the ‘#’ from the URL when performing a redirect. Google pointed me to some sites that claimed that adding an ampersand should solve this, but that did not work. I made a little PHP-script to test with different encoding-tricks, but that did not work. So that old fart of a browser indeed did not support anchors in redirect-URL’s and that’s what I told the colleagues last Thursday.

Yesterday I started writing this post, thinking it was a great time to demand the death of the piece of junk that Microsoft unleashed on us back in 2001 and which, believe it or not, still has 16,94% market share. So I replaced the company-specific address in the php-script with the URL of the wikipedia-page about anchors and … it just worked, even in MSIE 6! And then I remembered getting that silly popup in MSIE 6, warning me that “The current website is trying to open a site in your Trusted sites list”. Apparently the ugly bugger does not only ask you if he can redirect, but also eats the anchor in target-URL’s that are in your Trusted sites.

So dear colleagues, in case you’re reading this; you can send out that newsletter now, it’ll work for everyone except for those who are silly enough to use MSIE 6 with our site in their “Trusted sites”-list. And let’s not forget; MSIE 6 must die is dead!